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Manila Bulletin devider Opinion devider Mysteriously

Mysteriously

Published Feb 19, 2022 12:05 am
MEDIUM RARE Jullie Y. Daza News item, Feb. 16: “Showbiz celebrities Vice Ganda and Glaiza de Castro revealed they got hitched on Valentine’s Eve.” Did Vice ditch Ion in Vegas? Two years after “Crash Landing on You” became the top Korean hit in the Philippines, its stars announced last week that they’re getting married. Right on cue, the series is now on replay on Netflix, with a déjà vu: It’s currently No. 10 in the Philippines. Love is lovelier the second time around. . . but then, love is the biggest mystery of all. Proof of which is, no one has successfully defined love in one simple sentence. A chiller of a thriller is the disappearance of 29 sabungeros (cockfighting fans), some of them since nine months ago. With nary a clue to go on, the police are asking the same questions as the missing men’s families. Where are they? Who’s keeping them? Who’s feeding them – please, not chicken adobo. How can 29 able-bodied men disappear, in batches on different dates, only to vanish into thin air? The cops are guessing it’s a case of game fixing, maybe a double cross, but they’re not crowing about it. As summer approaches, so does the threat of another series of “water interruptions.” A shortage is on the horizon, fear not, the level in Angat dam going down each day as we speak. It’s no longer a mystery why we have a National Water Resources Board when all they do is tell us what our weather forecasters already know. I was in Sacramento, California, more than a dozen years ago when they were in the middle of a drought, with no news of households experiencing a shortage though there were rules against wasteful use. To this day the drought persists, with no inconvenience to the general population. In the United Arab Emirates, where they have built handsome structures on the sand and in the water, citizens wouldn’t know what a water shortage means. Besides, their water comes free. Which is the greater mystery? Perennial shortages in our typhoon-battered archipelago, or UAE’s free flowing water in the desert? Still the greatest mystery involves the 3,650,000 of us categorized as “total cases” of COVID infections as of two days ago: Where did the virus catch you?

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